


Better Life

by CakeorDeath



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M, Family, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-16
Updated: 2011-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-19 11:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CakeorDeath/pseuds/CakeorDeath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: In which life is fucking complicated, and people do not act in the way that commonsense* dictates.</p><p>* Or, how people who never have and almost certainly never will be in that situation think people who are in that situation should behave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Life

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to my beta hellokatzchen!
> 
> Disclaimer: Not mine.
> 
> From the Where No Woman Mother's Day ficathon: 9. Gaila and her mother: I want a better life for you.

The mess had steel floors and rickety plastic chairs, and it was so cold that Gaila shivered as she sat under the flickering lights. There was no one there save Gaila and her mother, who was getting their evening meal from the machine. Gaila stared at the plate that, with years of careless handling, had more pot-holes than chips. It was a brownish, grey colour and the smell did not so much waft as seep.

Gaila’s mouth twisted into disgust. She knew that she was lucky to get food, that there were starving children on Ersen Major who would give their right arm to get a hot dinner _every_ day. When Gaila had asked Danae, the woman who looked after the children in the evenings, if they couldn’t just send it to these starving alien children, she had been made to stand in the refrigeration room for ten minutes and was told she would come to a bad end if she didn’t mind her manners.

At that point, to everyone’s relief, Gaila’s mother suggested that maybe the child could eat  
dinner with her-- between the early evening and late night shifts.

“Gaila, my child, lift your chin and get that look off your face.”

“Sorry, Mother.” Gaila sighed, with a touch of melodrama.

“Child, look at that light.” Gaila looked up at the flickering light, aggressive in its brightness. “It’s a chandelier. With a hundred candles lighting up this room.”

“No, mother, it isn’t. Are you feeling woozy?”

“No, Gaila, _look_. Look at this table, see the table cloth. Bright red, velvet.” She pointed to the off-white plates, and said in a low voice, “The purest bone-china.”

Gaila looked at their plastic cups. “These goblets are filled with wine. For you. And I’m having orange juice.” Gaila had drunk orange juice once or twice, in year old cartons from Federation aid packages that came with the education packs.

“What do the goblets look like?”

Gaila tried to concentrate, to see past the blue plastic. “They’re golden, with those red sparkly stones, and those swirling white ones.”

Gaila looked up at the chandelier, high above their heads, and looked around a beautiful ball, being described by her mother. The food tasted just as awful as it always did, but somehow it did not matter as much.

Gaila’s mother could not stop the bad things happening, but Gaila conceded she could make things seem a bit better.

 

Maiden looked like the old army machinery lying about the place; all dark green skin and exposed, wiry hair. Her glare was like those old bombs that you were _fairly_ sure were detonated.

Gaila’s mother was carried in by Mercy, the oldest and strongest of the women, who laid her down on her front. The blood spewing out between the green of Gaila’s mother’s back reminded Gaila of the tiger’s strips on the Earth’s fauna section of her geography edu-vid. Gaila went to the bed and put her arms around her mother’s head.

“You get in the way child and I boot you out of here.” Gaila did not respond to Maiden, who obviously took this as understanding, because she grunted and began the healing song. The words were harsh, to mirror the pain the patient was feeling, as the suction pipes took away all the now exposed and worthless blood and the heart went into overdrive, keeping the new supply racing round. These were not like the false, happy songs created for human consumption-- to add a bit of ‘authentic’ colour to the brothel. This was a song of the Orion women and their pain, pain etched into their bones and sewn into their guts.

The operation lasted eight hours, and Gaila did not move from her spot at the head of the bed. She even joined the other women in pissing into the bucket that was passed round. When her mother was out of danger, Maiden took Gaila to one side and said, her face serious but happy, “You are only eight years in the making, but today you became a woman.”

 

The edu-packs sent by the Federation were not enough to sate Gaila’s curiosity. She gobbled up knowledge with a reckless abandon.

She had been punished for dismantling the food machine to see if it could be made to have nicer tasting food, even though she had been able to put it back together perfectly. As Gaila scrubbed filthy unused engine parts, she daydreamed about the USS _Shackleton_. She wanted to be one of those people in red partly because it matched her hair and partly because it seemed the most exciting place to be in the whole universe, running about in the middle of that huge ship.

 _Yes_ , she decided. _That’s what I’ll do_. Her mind was made up. And mother? Well, she could be … well, she was very good at imaging stories, perhaps she could make up the stories in the packs for the young ones.

It had all seemed so simple then.

 

Gaila was sitting on her bed, worrying a thread on the coverlet.

“Child, your mother is concerned about you. _I’m_ concerned about you; we all are. You must get your head out of these clouds and focus on earning your keep. All the other girls your age – and quite a few younger ones, I might add – are earning their keep. Don’t you want to? Do you want to be a liability to all of us- to your mother?” Maiden said, her hands on her hips.

“No, obviously not.” The words came out sharp and Gaila could not suppress the pang of irritation. “Isn’t there another way I could earn money?”

“What?” Gaila’s mother interjected, obviously at the end of her patience. “This is what we do: me, Maiden, your friends, everyone you’ve ever known does this! Do you think you’re special? Do you think you are better than your own mother?”

The awful thing was that she sort of was. Gaila knew she was the cleverest at lessens, better than anyone. Most of the older women, including her mother, couldn’t even read, whereas Gaila had earned full marks on even the hardest tests, tests meant for older girls. This was what they were arguing about: Gaila had run out of free education, and now the packs sent by the Federation would cost a ‘small fee’, which might as well be a million credits for how well they could afford it. “And you know it’s not just the packs, but the electricity and the intranet and the loss of earnings you should be bringing in- it all adds up,” Maiden had said, when mother had brought Gaila to see her to ‘make the silly child see wisdom’.

“Can’t I study during my time off? That way I’ll be bringing money in.”

Maiden rolled her eyes. “Gaila, you’ve had your education. Don’t you think the little ones should have a chance? You are being very selfish.”

“And I didn’t raise you to be selfish, I know that,” Gaila’s mother sniffed.

“Can I ask a question?”

“You have asked quite a few of those already, but go on,” said Maiden with a look of long-suffering patience.

“Don’t you ever feel as if you need more?”

Her mother looked shocked. “Gaila! What a thing to say!”

Maiden sighed and said that most irritating of sentences, “It’s the young people today, don’t know they’re born.”

“Gaila, you really do have no idea. I have food, as much as I can eat. I have medical help. I have time to sleep. That is much better than anything my mother had. I do not have more children than I can count running around; I have one chosen child, who I love very much even though she is being tiresome at this precise moment.” Gaila’s mother smiled; Gaila did not.

“And you!” she continued. “You have so much more than I could have imagined. An education, so much time before you start working, security … What more do you want?”

“Are you really happy?”

The women both gave her looks that would have burned toast. “You see, this is what becomes of spending too much time with what those humans send,” Maiden said with a sigh.

“It’s from the Federation.”

“Yes, and how many Orions have they got in that parliament of theirs?” Gaila’s mother clapped her hands as if somehow that was the end of it. Gaila felt her mouth forcing itself tightly closed, lest she wouldn’t be able to contain her rage.

“Gaila, look, you are a bright girl, you could go far,” Maiden said, tapping Gaila’s hand to emphasise her point. “One day you could be in charge of all of the women here.”

That was it. “Yes! Yes, I could encourage so many young girls to sell themselves for money so that _humans_ could use them!”

There was a silence.

“If I had spoken like that when I was your age,” said Gaila’s mother, words like the slowly speeding rocks of an avalanche, “I would have been beaten so hard I would have stood for a week. You apologise to Maiden this second!

“ _This second_ , Gaila!”

“Sorry! All right?”

Her mother turned to Maiden. “I don’t know what has got into this child; I have been far too lenient with her, that’s clear.”

“I’m not angry, you know, child,” Maiden said, with a tone so even it was obviously hiding something. “I am disappointed. I had thought you were a clever girl who could have a grown up discussion. Clearly I was wrong. Tomorrow you start working, no arguments.”

“And you can go to bed early to think about how you’ve been acting recently. I’m not standing for this, child, not at all!”

“Mother, are you happy? Really? To be forcing your child to fuck some pissed up human because that’s what _your_ mother did?”

Gaila’s mother did not hit her, which was clearly a result of Herculaneum effort on her part. Instead she turned and stalked out of the room, muttering under her breath.

 

The translucent dress – a pink colour, befitting her youth – was slightly too small, meaning that she felt even more self-conscious as she was led from the living quarters into the working quarters for the first time. It was the first time in her whole life she had left the small area of the ship where she had been brought up in her memory.

No one actually _said_ anything, but there was a general sense of ‘Her Majesty coming down to see the commoners, is she?’ She knew that she had made herself unpopular, had put on airs with her education and her long words. She _did_ think she was better than them; she had ambitions and weird thoughts. Why couldn’t she be normal?

 _You always remember your first_. That’s what they said. The first pair of hands rubbing themselves over your body, taking you away from yourself. She would get used to this. That’s what they said. A great comfort.

 

“I want to join Starfleet.”

They had been going at it for a couple of hours.

“Stupid, foolish child! _You are clever_! But you act like someone who … Gods.” Gaila’s mother turned away and began to viciously make tea. “You are so naïve, humans are not like us-”

“I know what humans are like, Mother!”

“Some pissed idiot who comes to this shitty little space station and goes to the cheapest brothel here is not representative of humans! Of the Federation! They are clever, cleverer than me; yes, even cleverer than you, Miss Brains! You think you can just go to Earth and they’ll let you into Starfleet? They don’t _want_ you there, all right. You remind them that people like us exist, people who don’t fit into their plan! They’ll put you away on some shitty colony, and that’s if some evil cunt doesn’t get to you first; you could end up in place far worse than this, let me tell you!”

“But Starfleet-”

“How many Starfleet people do we see coming in here? How many?” She was screaming now, her hair static, like the panic was powering her ever further into rage. “They don’t have so many ideals then, do they? When they go to a brothel they _know_ uses slave labour.”

“Mother, I can’t spend the rest of my life here, I can’t! I would rather die!”

Gaila’s mother became very still, like the clockwork had run out. “Look, things change. Slowly. Very slowly. When I was growing up I never thought I would have an education, now look at you! Too much education, in fact. Who knows what your children will have.”

“I can’t wait. I know it’s selfish and I do think I’m better than you, it’s true, but I can’t wait till I’m old to see hope comes true.”

“Why are you so different from everyone else?”

“I was there, when they saved your life, when you were attacked. I don’t want my child to go through that. I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want you to die like that.”

“Gaila …”

“I don’t want you to live like this mother! You shouldn’t have to be poor for the rest of your life. I can’t stand the idea of you pimping yourself out till you are worn out, dying tired and sad. You deserve better. I will work for you, like you have for me, and you will have a better life.”

“I do have a _better_ life! I _am_ happy!”

“I am not a child. I can’t ignore the truth and play pretend anymore.”

Nothing was said after that. Gaila’s mother made the tea and went to the laundry room.

What could be said?

 

Elliot had long blood hair, and a very pink face. He spoke with a Terran accent that was highly pronounced, so that sometimes she couldn’t understand him. His Starfleet uniform looked wrong on him, all at once too big and too small. He had been drunk the first time Gaila had been with him, and he was clumsily polite and gentle, asking her where she wanted to be touched. Gaila found this irritating normally – it wasn’t a problem for her that it was unequal exchange, but let’s be honest with ourselves – except Elliot was different. Or was he? She did not find him sexually exciting, nor morally admirable, not intellectually stimulating. But he liked Gaila. He asked for her, every time he could afford to go to the brothel.

“Gaila, I love you. Oh, God, God God God. You’re amazing!”

Gaila moaned and jolted. “Ohhhhh.”

Elliot slumped down, a smile on his face. “What can I do for you, my darling? What do you want?”

Gaila lay back into the pillows and remembered her mother’s back, striped with blood. “I want you to get me out.”

 

It wasn’t simple. Things never are. Because you needed paperwork just to get off the space station and Gaila had never left the brothel in her memory and Elliot had very little money, while Gaila had none at all.

But somehow, one day, she was packing her last few possessions and waiting until she heard the distraction that Elliot had paid some local grunts to put on and making a run for it, to the first dangerous, disgusting ride out of this shithole. There was no chance to say goodbye to her mother.

 

There were ten intranet stations for the two hundred refugees on the Relocation Station, and Gaila had to queue for half an hour to check for her messages. As she finally pushed in her date card and got up her messages, her heart sank as she saw the words _we regret to inform you_. That was it then; she hadn’t got in. She clicked the message.

 _Dear Ms Gaila,_

 _We regret to inform you that we have recently been informed of an attack on Space Station Alpha Five Four Seven. The list of registered dead includes Eve, daughter of Saeeaphireya, mother of Gaila._

 _Condolences,  
The Federation Refugee Authority. _

The next message was from Starfleet Admissions, and Gaila could see the word ‘congratulate’.

Gaila logged out, and went back to her cabin. Her roommate, an elderly half human, half alien (Gaila did not know what) named Salma, was out. With unshaking hands, Gaila poured herself a double shot of rum. The sharp pain in her throat as it went down was an utter relief – some tangible feeling.

Holy shit.

She thought of a red haired woman with black tattoos covering her back and arms, she thought of a tough old woman with a slight moustache growing on her upper lip which she had stopped bothering to bleach now that those ungrateful humans had lost any interest in her, she thought of imaging that she was a magical Orion princess with her own personal witch. She thought of her mother.

It was only when Salma came back that Gaila realised she had not moved from where she had been standing in the middle of the room, staring at the slim mirror in the cupboard with the empty glass still in hand.

“Hello, Salma.”

“Hello.” There was a pause. They didn’t talk much; there was too much baggage each wanted to keep to themselves amid all the prodding of the immigration authorities. “Are you okay dear?”

Gaila opened her mouth to take a breath, and out they came, those treacherous sobs. “Gods. I’m sorry.”

“Are you … do you want me to fetch anyone?”

“No, thank you. It’s just my mother died.” _The list of registered dead_. “And … I don’t know who else from the … from where I was brought up.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. So … that’s awful. Is there anything … would you like a hug?” The red blood changed the colour of the women’s brown cheeks Gaila noted. A sign of embarrassment. Humans were strange, even half human ones.

“No. Thank you.”

“Sorry, I … do you want me to go?”

“I got into Starfleet.”

“My goodness, dear, that’s excellent.”

“What’s the point? The whole reason I applied, the whole reason I’m here is because of my mother. I wanted a better life for her. Why the fuck I am here?”

“You … your mother would have proud of you-”

“No, she wouldn’t. She was terrified for me. She wanted me to stay a prostitute until I got too old for a human to want to fuck me. Well, not _want_ me exactly, it’s complicated. But, please don’t say that.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to … Goodness. Why don’t we sit down?” They sat in silence for such a long time, Gaila got rather embarrassed, even in her heightened state. “You know, maybe you are here because you wanted to be here. For you. Yourself.”

There was an even longer silence.

“I’m not selfish. I care about my about my clan.” Even if Gaila didn’t believe the words, she was damned if she was going to admit to being a selfish scumbag bitchy whore to this old woman.

“I loved where I grew up. Really. I loved the people who were there, watching them grow old, the purple sunsets, all of it. But when my wife died I thought _I’m eighty three and I might have thirty more years in this universe. Will I spend those being shunned by my own people and spat at by humans, being terrified of Klingon attacks and meteorite showers?_ You are allowed to want to be happy. Very few people are, really. You owe it to them to grasp the chance when you can.

“And if I know anything, you will be an astounding Starfleet officer.”

“I haven’t applied for officer training,” Gaila said, because she couldn’t think about a better response to something like that from a near stranger.

“Why ever not?”


End file.
